Stories I Missed While I Was On Vacation

Photo via 750 Volts

The U.S. drop-shipped 363 tons of cold, hard cash, the long green, on pallets to Baghdad in the days before the Coalition Provisional Government turned the reins over to the Iraqis. That's 4 BILLION dollars in $100 bills for those of you keeping score at home, the largest ever shipment by the Federal Reserve Bank. Think about that when you're paying your taxes in April. Think harder about that when you're voting in November!

Boston freaks out over a guerrilla marketing scheme involving light boxes. Do terrorists usually put brightly colored lights on their bombs?

Tim Russert's reputation in tatters: Dick Cheney's press flack testifies that they go to Press the Meat so they can control their message (Timmuh won't ask any hard questions); Pumpkinhead himself testifies that all his conversations with government officials are presumptively off the record. As Dan Froomkin says, that's not reporting, that's enabling.

Joe Biden calls Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy". Obama was not amused: "I didn't take Senator Biden's comments personally, but obviously they are historically inaccurate. After all, we've had presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Mosely Braun and Al Sharpton. They gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns and no one would call them inarticulate."

Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) is reportedly reading news reports and doing some work from the hospital.

Creepy chuckle by Crawford Caligula, as UPI reports:

At a farewell reception at Blair House for the retiring chief of protocol, Don Ensenat, who was President Bush's Yale roommate, the president shook hands with Washington Life Magazine's Soroush Shehabi. "I'm the grandson of one of the late Shah's ministers," said Soroush, "and I simply want to say one U.S. bomb on Iran and the regime we all despise will remain in power for another 20 or 30 years and 70 million Iranians will become radicalized."

"I know," President Bush answered.

"But does Vice President Cheney know?" asked Soroush.

President Bush chuckled and walked away.